Talent Management Conference 2010 at Lagos Business School | Nigeria

By HRF |
09/28/2010

Back in January HRF announced that Chairman Bryan Sanderson, and Directors Teresa Payne
and Mercedes Jaureguibeitia had been invited to participate in a series of CSR related events taking
place in Lagos Business School, Nigeria. By inviting representatives from the Foundation, the
organisers hoped to encourage participants to address the current knowledge gap within this topic.
The events, which were hosted by the Etisalat Center for Corporate Social Responsibility of
Lagos Business School, took place in late September (2010) and consisted of a CSR conference, a CEO
Forum and a Talent Management conference. Despite targeting different audiences and
approaching the topic from different perspectives, the Foundation was given exposure at each of the
three events. Mr. Sanderson was asked to deliver the keynote address at both the CSR conference
and the CEO Forum as well as give a joint presentation with Teresa Payne at the Talent Management
conference.

These contributions allowed HRF to voice a message at the very heart of the Foundation’s
mission: the direct link between looking after an individual’s basic human needs and effecting
societal change geared towards creating a more humane society. At the CSR conference, Mr.
Sanderson spoke mainly in terms of macroeconomics and gave global examples of the potential
benefits of CSR and in doing so he created a parallelism between the influence a company can have
in the world and the contribution of the home to society. This theme was later developed by Ms.
Payne in the Talent Management conference where she drew from her own professional experience
as partner of a law firm to argue that a happy, healthy and balanced employee is a productive
employee. The best investment a company can make towards its own growth and sustainability,
therefore, is to look after the well-being of its employees.

As a catalyst for change, HRF presents the work of the home as work that has the potential
to define a society. There are, undoubtedly, many different ways in which this work can be seen as a
crucial element to the inner workings of a society and at these events the context was almost purely
corporate. Of course, as a Business School LBS had invited the representatives from the Foundation
to speak about the work of the home in light of CSR rather than from an anthropological perspective
and the links between the two were not entirely evident at the outset. Interestingly, however, the
participants made the connection themselves and one of the participants even proposed that ‘the
first CSR is the home.’

The response HRF’s messages generated in LBS demonstrates that the Foundation has a
strong universal mission that resonates with people from all walks of life. It also highlighted the fact
that the way our mission takes shape practically and the ways in which we act as a catalyst for
change vary from place to place and person to person. International meetings such as this recent
visit to Nigeria are evidence of the richness of international knowledge sharing on the subject of the
work of the home and are, we hope, an excellent springboard for international participation at the
2011 Sustainable Living conference.